Tech Rants and Predictions

I get really annoyed with the safety labels on products these days - because of the fear of being sued, manufacturers place every possible warning they can think of on the products they build.

What this does is make a simple product like, say a toaster have a 4 page SAFETY SECTION, which, lets face it - none of us are going to read. They have things like - 'dont use the toaster outdoors in a thunderstorm', or 'dont use the toaster in a bathroom' . All these warnings are put there because some poor fool somewhere once did this, or some executive *thinks* that someone might do this at some stage in the future.

The outcome of this is is that if there was some specific *real* warning on that product which is non obvious which should be labelled, no one is going to see it, because no one will wade through 4 pages of obvious crap to find the real serious warning. (e.g. This toaster catchs fire if you try to toast crumpets)

Another example is medicines. They all used to have specific warnings, but these days there is a 12 page printout (times new roman 3 point) showing every possible bad thing that could happen. Almost all medicine warinngs include 'in extreme cases may cause coma or even death'. Great - that is really helpful. Now I dont know the difference between taking your pills or drinking a bucket of cyanide, since both lead to death and the warning labels would be similar.

There are some products which are seriously dangerous. Some cleaning products should NOT be used indoors, some medicines should NOT be taken with 'x', and some irons/tumble dryers should not be left unattended (overheating and catch fire). But you will never know which ones, because it is now one of the 46 dot points in the list of what not to do with your new product, and after dot point 23 'dont use if you are drunk and flying a jumbo jet' your eyes would have glazed over and you'd miss the ONE REAL IMPORTANT WARNING.

I think they should keep their ever increasing list of stupid scenarios on what not to do with the product (just to keep the laywers happy, because as we know the stupid people who do these things never read instructions anyway), but have a big red letter warning section at the start of this saying 'THIS IS THE REAL IMPORTANT BIT' and have 1 - 3 warnings there. If there are any more than 3 serious warnings then what the hell is your product doing on the market anyway?

My favourite warning label is of course:
"Warning - Contains Peanuts" (on a peanut butter jar)

Net banking is improving daily and has rapidly gained acceptance, despite huge increases in phishing attempts, virus alerts and other scarey things in the media. This is a good thing - it didnt seem that long ago that we were all queueing up at the post office or writing out numerous cheques each payday, but now it is so much simpler.

I'd like to see the banks bring out much more advanced applications - everything from budgetting, commentary for your tax return, as well as the collection of useful little finance utilities that are floating around. They need to do some serious integration (maybe even buy out one of the existing Finance software vendors - Quickbooks, MYOB, etc) and give the customers full access to all the features. The results would help both parties:
- customers would have a great application to REALLY manage their funds/bills/savings
- banks would have less people switching banks, because it is a pain to switch software

Other web portals have tried this, but this is doomed to failure - how on earth is it logical to export data from your bank, fiddle with it in excel or your finance application and then upload to a website to have easy access. No way - not ever going to catch on because:
1) do you trust this 3rd party web portal to keep your information private? No.
2) do you like importing/exporting data around the place? No.

Using a finance planner on the banks website is so completely safe (you trust the bank [ if not, why did you give them your money?]) and convenient (all your transaction data is there already) that it is suprising that they haven't already moved faster on this.

I am looking forward to trying them out, and if you know of a bank which already has an advanced finance application, let me know.

[PET PEEVE] One thing that banks aren't doing so well at is the upgrade of the new graphical ATM's - instead of waiting a normal 0.3 seconds for the keys to respond there is now a annoyingly noticable delay of 0.6-1.0 seconds after pressing a key to getting the screen to respond. What the HELL is that about? It looks pretty? BIG DEAL - I am in a queue trying to withdraw money and I dont give a shit about nice pictures or worthless advents especially when it impacts on the funcationality. [END PET PEEVE]

I dont understand why Sony did this - they were making pretty cool devices recently, but just a few weeks ago they were busted installing Rootkits [secret software installed on your PC which 'prevents' you from burning the music to disk so it can be listened to on your MP3 player; BUT also happens to allow hackers all over the world to remotely log onto your PC and access all your files].

I think the problem is with the RIAA and their scare tactics - 'pirates are everywhere - they will steal your IP / music and give it away on P2P networks [yawn]'. What is really happening is that people (funnily enough) want to be able to listen to the CD which WE PURCHASED on OUR portable MP3 player without having to lug around multiple CD's. From a consumers point of view - all this DRM crap is a complete annoyance, and if they dont wake up soon, then NO ONE will be buying CD's anymore.

You know those cute little USB flash drives you can get for about $70 AU which hold 512M of data?
Well, they are going to be the future of personal digital storage.

The average user can now easily hold all the documents they have ever written on one of these little devices, and unless you create lots of digital video or create (that means paint/draw/etc - NOT download) a lot of graphics files, then this storage medium is currently the best thing we have for the average user to keep all their info in one place.

There was a horrible period of PC sales from about 1997 to 2002 when the average computer shop offered no wayfor a person to backup their own data - prior to 1997 you could fit almost all your files on a few floppy disks, and after 2002 CDR's where cheap and commonplace (and more importantly, they were included as standard in PC's).

Of course, the problem is that most people dont backup their data to CD on any sort of regular basis - and this is where I see the USB flash drive as being important.

In a few short years (months even - the way the prices are dropping), we'll have 1-4G USB flash drives for under a $100, and this is will be able to handle the storage capacity of 95% of the computer users [remember - this doesnt include downloaded files - if you downloaded them once, then you didnt create it and you'll be able to get it again if the worst comes to the worst.]

We will get into the habit of saving files which we create directly to the USB drive - it will be the 'My Documents' of the future, and it is completely portable (sits in your pocket - or on your keyring) and can have encryption built into them if you are worried about other people reading them.

The main benefit will be - that we will always have our own personal and *useful* information at hand - your favourites list, email and Instant messenger contacts, personal documents (resume, budget, ) all the source code you've ever written - and the best thing is that they act like a normal drive - you simply plug it into a normal computer and bingo - all your info is there.

As long as Moores Law continues as it is, then we will have more than enough storage space for our *important* digital documents which make up our lives and not the hundreds of gigabytes of mostly junk which lives on our hard drives.

1. Most software patents which have been granted are completely obvious to a first year computer programmer - e.g. 'one click shopping'

2. There have been thousands of these stupid software patents granted, and even though they haven't been enforced yet [the big players are in a sort of mexican standoff - they each have patents which can hurt the other big player, but that company will retaliate and hurt them in reply. Can you see the pattern - its a bit like the movie 'Wargames' where the computer realises that the only winning move is not to play. This is a bit like how the current patent crisis sits.]

3. BUT - should the 'big players' decide to *target* a small business or individual then that target will be completely crushed due to the overally general nature of the existing software patents. Mind you, this will cause a complete media storm (and rightly so) which would damage the big companies, but the problem still exists - the big boys can crush the newcomers quickly and legally at will.

There - I've said it. It's posted on the web, its public - cannot be retrieved and will be probably cached by numerous search engines only to come back and haunt me years later.

My shareware products will be using XML in the future, but I still stick with the overall comment that XML is overrated bullshit.

I've seen many fads come and go, some good, some bad, some fantastic and some plain silly. But the XML craze that began is odd because 'people were already doing it'.

It is essentially a structured text file - whoppee do! Smart windows developers and almost all Unix/Linux developers have been using text files for years. But now we slap a few HTML tags around the data and bingo - new industry springs up overnight, heralding a new age of interconnected computing.

"Why are going to use it, if its so overrated?" I hear you cry.
I already use text files for all configuration and data options in my applications, so its reasonably trivial to convert them to XML format. This is my main point - I believe (and others will back me up on this) that we should have been using text format all along, and my problem with XML isn't that its not a good idea (it is), its just that it was being done by thousands of others for years and it comes along as if it’s the new messiah.


By the way, XML is actually the reason I started a blog - just so the world knows that *someone* doesn't think the sun shines out of XML's bum.

Cheers.
Duncan

Welcome to my blog.

Here is where I intend to rant and rave about the pro's and con's of any technology that I feel like talking about.

There will be bold predictions - unjustified whinges - insightful comments and, yes even some humour!

I am 38 years old, Male, currently working as a Senior Business Analyst and run a part time shareware company. I've been a computer programmer for over 20 years now, and I have a wide range of experiance with all sorts of technological junk.